By David Goldberg, on Sun May 3, 2015 at 3:57 PM ET Editor’s Note: I ran into David Goldberg at our 25th college reunion, having not seen him since our last reunion. Dave and I had never been close friends, but he had generously supported many of my political campaigns, and I had proudly watched as he and his wife Sheryl Sandberg each emerged as spectacular success stories in the business world. At the reunion, he generously offered to contribute a few pieces to this web site to share his wisdom to our readers who were looking to launch their second acts as entrepreneurs in Dave’s model.
David’s final piece for the RP, published last September 29, which discusses lessons learned from our reunion, is particularly poignant in the wake of his tragic, much too early death last week. Our deepest condolences go out to Sheryl and his family – Jonathan Miller
“It was twenty (five) years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They’ve been going in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to make you smile.”
– Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
 Every day, one survey or another informs us about the attitudes and intentions of a particular group of people. Once in a while, a survey also offers up life lessons.
That was the case with an interesting survey that I and 434 other members of the Harvard Class of 1989 completed this summer. Some of the results are merely statistical. For instance, most class members majored in history, economics, and English. Most ended up in education, healthcare, business, finance, and law. Us pre-Internet grads? We’re now big users of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Other findings are more telling. Just over 10% say they need either more love or sex. However, a whopping 34% say they need more sleep—perhaps a lesson in how our priorities change after college! Surprisingly more than 40% of our class declared they took too little risk. Only 4% say they took too much. It was unexpected to see so few of us feel we’d taken enough risks along the way.
The most compelling insights came from an open-ended question. Here it is and a sample of the responses:
“If you could travel back to 1989 and explain your last 25 years to your younger self, what would that graduating senior have found most surprising?”
- You need to listen more.
- How hard it is to juggle work and family.
- Being gay does not hinder your life.
- The role luck plays in both good and bad life outcomes.
- That choosing a single career might not be enough—having two or three options ready would have been smarter.
- I have done none of the things that I considered likely that I would do.
- The fear of failure is far, far worse than the actual experience of it.
- How hard it is to settle on a satisfying career. Take time to explore.
- Home, family, and relationships trump career.
- The dramatic change technology played.
- How profound an experience it is to have and raise children.
- That the Red Sox have won the World Series three times.
Great responses. Some were funny. Some were serious. All were revealing. The answers show that at our 25th reunion, we are students of life. What we’d tell our younger self shows that as much time as we spend hitting the books or burning the midnight oil — or worrying about our future — the real lessons about who we are and what’s important happen after school and work. So get out. Live a little. Take it all in. Survey says you’ll learn more than you expect.
By David Goldberg, on Mon Sep 29, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “It was twenty (five) years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They’ve been going in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to make you smile.”
– Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles
Every day, one survey or another informs us about the attitudes and intentions of a particular group of people. Once in a while, a survey also offers up life lessons.
That was the case with an interesting survey that I and 434 other members of the Harvard Class of 1989 completed this summer. Some of the results are merely statistical. For instance, most class members majored in history, economics, and English. Most ended up in education, healthcare, business, finance, and law. Us pre-Internet grads? We’re now big users of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Other findings are more telling. Just over 10% say they need either more love or sex. However, a whopping 34% say they need more sleep—perhaps a lesson in how our priorities change after college! Surprisingly more than 40% of our class declared they took too little risk. Only 4% say they took too much. It was unexpected to see so few of us feel we’d taken enough risks along the way.
The most compelling insights came from an open-ended question. Here it is and a sample of the responses:
“If you could travel back to 1989 and explain your last 25 years to your younger self, what would that graduating senior have found most surprising?”
- You need to listen more.
- How hard it is to juggle work and family.
- Being gay does not hinder your life.
- The role luck plays in both good and bad life outcomes.
- That choosing a single career might not be enough—having two or three options ready would have been smarter.
- I have done none of the things that I considered likely that I would do.
- The fear of failure is far, far worse than the actual experience of it.
- How hard it is to settle on a satisfying career. Take time to explore.
- Home, family, and relationships trump career.
- The dramatic change technology played.
- How profound an experience it is to have and raise children.
- That the Red Sox have won the World Series three times.
Great responses. Some were funny. Some were serious. All were revealing. The answers show that at our 25th reunion, we are students of life. What we’d tell our younger self shows that as much time as we spend hitting the books or burning the midnight oil — or worrying about our future — the real lessons about who we are and what’s important happen after school and work. So get out. Live a little. Take it all in. Survey says you’ll learn more than you expect.
By David Goldberg, on Tue Sep 9, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “If you had one shot, or one opportunity. To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment. Would you capture it or just let it slip?”
Lose Yourself – Eminem
Taking that shot at starting a business feels like jumping off a ski jump- you know should be able to land but it will require luck and skill. I started my first business with my friend Bob Roback twenty years ago with an idea. We fundamentally believed that the computer was going to be the way people consumed and discovered music. We created a prototype using the cutting edge technology available to us in 1994 to create a monthly CD-ROM that people played on their computer. It was called LAUNCH and was described as an “MTV that you could control.”
We landed well, though it was never easy. LAUNCH Media became a successful internet company that we eventually sold to Yahoo! in 2001. But, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Unfortunately, there is no way to go to school to be a great entrepreneur. Experience is the only teacher and you don’t know what you don’t know when you start a company for the first time.
Here are some lessons that I learned along the way. Just because they worked for me doesn’t mean they will always work but I wish had understood these better before I started:
1. Play to your personal strengths. Aggressively and honestly identify your own weaknesses and supplement accordingly. Staff your team with people smarter and more knowledgeable than you are in those areas. This will let you focus your skills and expertise where they can have the most impact. I have learned what I am good at, and what I like to do; they are highly correlated. Correspondingly, hiring people to do the things you aren’t good at and don’t like will make you better at your role. (I recommend the book StrengthsFinder if you need help figuring out your strengths, but you could also do a quick survey of your peers, colleagues and family.)
2. Talk to people. Don’t fall into the trap of operating in stealth mode – your connections to others will be critical to success. Build a support structure including people who have been there and done it. There’s a pay-it-forward mentality among most entrepreneurs. Take advantage of it. Secrecy has some advantages but most ideas aren’t what make businesses successful – it is execution. To be a great executor, you need to get a lot of help and advice. That is worth the trade off on secrecy.
3. Listen to doubters. If for no other reason than to be able to prove them wrong! Your detractors can be blessings in disguise: they are an unlikely source of inspiration and motivation, and they just might speak some truth. Listen carefully, take what you can use and leave what you can’t. I still remember all the people who told me that no one would ever listen to music or watch ads on a computer.
4. Start now! There are many reasons for not starting a business. The media constantly reminds us of the high taxes, increased regulations and other impediments to starting businesses today. Ignore them. With the support systems in place for entrepreneurs, and the availability of talent and capital, there’s never been a better time to start a business. When I started, I didn’t know anyone else who had started a business and the support systems were immature or non-existent.
So get moving and take that one shot. It’ll be the best decision you make.
By David Goldberg, on Mon Aug 25, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “Now I’ll be bold as well as strong. Use my head alongside my heart.”
I Will Wait – Mumford and Sons
In my last post, I talked about lessons I learned about myself during my continuing journey as an entrepreneur. You gain knowledge, mostly from your mistakes and your peers. You try to keep making constant improvements to your business, your team and your leadership skills. In the true entrepreneurial spirit of paying it forward, I thought I’d share some lessons about what I’ve learned about actually managing a business:
1. Be smart about funding. Raise money when you don’t need it, and raise it from the right investors. Don’t wait until you’re cash strapped to push the panic button, and look for investors who go beyond the wire transfer; those that will provide consistent guidance and be true coaches along the way.
This is clearly easier said than done. I have seen too many first time founders who have focused on the wrong things like valuation or control issues instead of getting investors who will add value beyond their cash. Some investors can actually harm your business- I was unfortunate to have a few of those in my first company and it had a very negative impact on our growth.
2. Fail fast. Most new ideas won’t work but you need to keep trying. Then, be ruthless about killing the ones that aren’t working and try to do it as quickly as possible. Time, money and focus are very limited resources in a startup. An idea that isn’t working can be a big drain.
3. Build a business, not just a great product or service. While it is fine to start with a great idea for a service or product and not worry about revenue immediately, you want to have a clear picture of where you will get paid and how you will build a sustainable business. Today, in the internet space, you can build interesting products quickly but it is much harder to build long term businesses with deep competitive moats.
4. Look at each market differently. When expanding beyond your own backyard, be prepared to address the specific concerns of multiple markets – a one-size-fits-all global strategy doesn’t work. Geo-specific insights, customer feedback, local case studies and social media channels are pivotal resources for establishing a voice that resonates with consumers in local markets across the globe.
5. Embrace competition. Don’t let competitors keep you from pursuing your idea. Good competitors can help your efforts by laying a foundation of credibility for your product category, help isolate your competitive niche and compel you to bring your best to the marketplace. We often wished we had more competition in my first business because we had to create the market by ourselves.
Running a start up today was different than it was 20 years ago. In 1994, when I started my first company, Incubators didn’t really exist outside of biology class. “Online” meant Compuserve and Prodigy on a speedy 28.8 modem. Mobile apps were eating Taco Bell nachos while driving.
Today, capital, knowledge, bandwidth and talent are in great abundance. What hasn’t changed is the belief that an inspired idea paired with an entrepreneurial spirit can lead to great things.
By David Goldberg, on Mon Aug 11, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “He’s got pretty persuasion. She’s got pretty persuasion. Goddamn, your confusion.” Pretty Persuasion – REM
Interviews can be deceiving and confusing. When you meet a candidate in person, you can get a lot of false positives. The candidate is on her best behavior, well prepped and aiming to sell you on herself as a great hire. Often, you will find yourself enjoying your conversation enough that you get persuaded to hire someone who really isn’t the right fit for the role. That is why I believe interviews are for weeding people out but real references are the best barometer for making a job offer. I have learned this through years of experience and mistakes. My friend Thomas Layton, the former CEO of OpenTable and current Chairman of Odesk, helped me confirm this approach when I started at SurveyMonkey in 2009.
 In my early days at SurveyMonkey, 100 percent of my time was spent on HR-related issues, specifically recruiting. At the time, SurveyMonkey was 14 people in Portland– my first priority was to scale the team. From a small office in Menlo Park, California, I had to find and hire talent. I had to interview everyone personally and make most of the decisions myself.
This meant tracking down and calling real references – a job most delegate to HR. I don’t think you learn much from references listed by the applicant. Those people are clearly going to say good things. You need to get real information from someone who you trust. Most of the people we hired in the beginning were two degrees away- that is, they were referred or connected to someone I knew. This allowed for honest feedback on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. If we didn’t have that direct reference to talk to, I used LinkedIn to find people who had worked with the person. Each role was different but some things were universal. I needed people who could flourish in a startup like culture but could also understand how to scale. Would he be willing to do his own work or did he just view his role as a manager, telling others what to do? How did she solve scale problems when they occurred? You can ask candidates those questions but it is much more valuable to understand how the person actually behaved in real situations.
Cultural fit is also important and impossible to figure out in an hour interview. How does the person work with peers, manage people and deal with stress? You can ask your real reference those questions; get past the “pretty persuasion” of the interview. I learned the hard way that someone who looks great on paper may not fit with our culture. Their experience simply didn’t carry over to their job with us. It turns out that people with seemingly relevant experience just are not interchangeable. A person who was an all-star at one company might not be able to repeat that performance in your organization, because his success may have derived from relationships with the previous employer, or her team may have propelled her achievement.
On the other hand, many people may not have the experience you feel is required for a job, but are just really smart, talented and motivated. When you take a chance on these employees and get it right, they become home grown talent – essentially your farm team. These are likely to be the carriers of your culture, and some of the best, most loyal employees because you took a chance and developed them from within. I have found it has worked to have a mix of experience and raw talent- the two types learn from each other.
At SurveyMonkey, we’ve moved talented people within the organization to give them room to stretch and grow — finance folks to business development roles, customer ops to engineering. It is much easier to take a chance on someone who already has proven themselves for you in another role than bring an experienced outsider in- the internal hire has all the boxes checked except experience.
As the company has grown, my time spent on HR-related matters has shrunk. Still, nearly one-third of my responsibilities relate to talent and culture. We are a company that defines success by getting and keeping the right people. I still do my own calls for all key hires and look for good spots to build that farm team of great talent. Let resumes and interviews be used to reject candidates but rely on real references to hire people.
By David Goldberg, on Mon Jul 28, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “We could simply pack our bags and catch a plane to Barcelona ‘cause this city’s a drag.”
– Holiday in Spain by Counting Crows
If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance I’m catching you on a mobile device. And according to the latest Pew data, 6% of U.S. consumers are mobile ONLY. No home phone. No computer. And from what I saw at Mobile World Congress(MWC) last month in Barcelona, this number is guaranteed to rise.
One of the major conversations at the conference centered on device form factors – they’re getting bigger. Samsung, Nokia and Sony all announced new phones with larger screen sizes, and Huawei showed off its new “phablet,” a phone-tablet combo with a 7.1-inch screen.
The other major trend we kept hearing about is the rise of wearables. Samsung announced a new smartwatch family – the Gear2, Gear Neo, and Gear Fit – while perpetual rumors about a similar Apple device continue to swirl. Things like smartwatches have yet to prove themselves, but simpler wearable technology that tracks daily habits without incorporating other messaging and connectivity components (FitBit, Nike Fuel, etc.) have clearly filled a consumer need.
Another trend that continues to gain momentum is the increasing use of consumer friendly tools and services in a business setting. The trend of people bringing their own devices, or BYOD, has been around for quite some time. It’s now evolved into BYOS – or bring your own services. I participated in a panel discussing BYOD/BYOS, along with executives from Evernote, Merck, AT&T and others.
As part of the panel we unveiled the results of a SurveyMonkey Audience survey to find out how many of us are downloading and using services on our mobile devices at work, independent of those recommended or offered by our employers. Here’s what we found:
Employees are spending more and more time on their phones for work purposes
- Almost 30% (29%) of people report that half of their time – or more – is spent using their mobile phones for work
- More than half of respondents (56%) report an increase in using their mobile phone for business over the past three years
And most believe they will spend even more time on their phone for work in the future
- The majority of respondents (52%) believe that they will increase their use of mobile phones for business in the future
Now that employees are bringing their own devices, they are bringing their own services, software and applications into the workplace
- Slightly more employees (31%) report bringing ALL their own services into the workplace vs. those that only use services approved/suggested/provided by their employer (28%)
- 29% of respondents report using a mix of services/applications that they downloaded themselves and those provided by their employers
- 8% do this a lot
- 8% do this a good amount
- 13% do this some of the time
With productivity tools continuing to be more consumer friendly, like Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google office apps, etc., and more mobile (we launched our own mobile app last month), this is another trend that will continue to generate lots of momentum. Innovations like these, and the others I saw during my trip to MWC, are going to accelerate the growth of that 6% mobile only number. Gracias, Barcelona!
By David Goldberg, on Tue Jul 15, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET “But if you never try, you’ll never know”—Fix You, Coldplay
Ten years ago, before I was a husband and father, I learned that giving flexible work hours to your best people is a great way to keep them. I was running Yahoo Music, and my senior business development leader, Karin, was doing a terrific job but needed some time at home after the birth of her first child. She asked me if she could work four days a week and get paid 80 percent of her full-time salary. Because she was a star performer, I agreed, though we hadn’t allowed people to work part-time before. Karin did a great job, and we never really noticed that she was out on Fridays. When her second child was born, she wanted to travel less. We switched her into a product development job, still at 80 percent time. She not only flourished but was eventually able to take on a general manager role at Yahoo in another group because she had experience in both business and product development. Karin has continued to progress in her career as a successful leader, and managed to keep her 80 percent schedule until her kids were in school full time.
When I became CEO of SurveyMonkey four years ago, I used this lesson in flexibility to help attract outstanding senior executives. Today, 40 percent of our senior executives are women with children, an unusually high number in the technology industry. I was able to hire Selina, our senior vice president of product and engineering, by having this elastic approach to hiring great people. At the time, Selina was four months pregnant with her first child. She had many opportunities to start or run her own company (she founded Evite when she was at Stanford), but I was able to persuade her that she could have both a huge impact and more flexibility by joining us than she would have by doing her own start up.
Minna, whom I hired early on to run SurveyMonkey’s international business, had taken a year off after her second child was born and was hesitant to commit to full-time work. I convinced her that she could work four days a week, like Karin, and I was confident that 80 percent of Minna was more than 100 percent of most people we could have hired. Brad, our head of user experience, was very interested in joining us, but he and his wife were expecting their first child and were concerned about his hours, wondering if it made sense for him to jump to a smaller company. Selina and I took Brad and his wife out to dinner and convinced both of them that it could work better—that if he joined our team, Brad would be able to be around more for his family by working a day a week from home.
Too often we focus on titles, compensation and perks to attract great people. I have learned that giving talented men and women flexibility and trusting them to excel has been key to hiring and retaining a great team.
The author is the Founder and CEO of Survey Monkey. Read his full bio here.
By David Goldberg, on Tue Jul 1, 2014 at 1:30 PM ET  Hemingway had it mostly right: “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
I’d actually take it a step further: most people never ask.
To be an effective leader, it’s crucial to develop a culture where employees feel consistently heard, and that their feedback is having an impact on the organization. A simple way to do this is to just start asking.
Think about it: how often do you ask your significant other, child, family members and friends, “How are you doing?” It’s probably more than once a year. Curiously, we don’t follow the same construct in the workplace. We usually only ask employees once a year.
Most companies typically do this through an annual employee survey, or worse, water cooler discussions at executive meetings where conjecture and subjective opinions are offered on how people are “feeling.” Multiple studies have proven that this type of infrequent, ad hoc means by which most solicit feedback from their workforce has an extremely negative impact on employee engagement. It’s probably why, in its 2013 State of the Global Workplace report, Gallup found only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work – a ridiculously low number.
Last year, we surveyed HR leaders in Silicon Valley to find out how they were keeping their employees happy, healthy and heard. Five key themes emerged:
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Money does matter
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Hands-on approach is key
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Employees want a voice
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Employees must feel valued
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Environment must be comfortable and positive
What’s interesting about the results is that 4 out of the 5 themes are centered on nurturing and building culture. This tells us that to really help employees thrive, listen to them. And, not just once a year. Culture isn’t an accident. It takes constant nurturing and work. One way to measure the health of your culture is through a series of employee engagement surveys.
At SurveyMonkey, we still do our annual employee survey. But we do it to identify a few key topics to explore deeper throughout the year. Then every three months, we solicit specific topic feedback and share the results with the team. For example, health benefits were an area that employees identified in the annual survey that they’d like improved. We followed up that annual survey with a specific benefits survey to all employees, and adjusted our offerings accordingly. The employees are part of the decision, feel heard, and we all feel a little bit wiser in the process. This ongoing survey dialogue allows your team leaders the ability to quickly identify issues and celebrate wins in real-time, not just once a year.
One parting word of wisdom. Don’t ask about things you’re not willing to change. Ignoring feedback is a sure way to disillusion a workforce. So, if you can’t change something, don’t ask. What you can change, involve employees. It will help build a healthy, thriving culture where everyone feels engaged and assured that their feedback has meaningful impact. So be wise. Stop talking. Ask and listen.
The author is the Founder and CEO of Survey Monkey
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